Lucien Conein

Lucien Emile Conein (29 November 1919-3 June 1998) was a French-American CIA agent who played a major role in orchestrating the 1963 South Vietnamese coup against Ngo Dinh Diem.

Biography
Lucien Conein was born in Paris, France in 1919, and, when he was five, he was sent by his widowed mother to live with his aunt in Kansas City, Missouri. He joined the French Foreign Legion at the age of 17, but he switched into the US Army after the Fall of France and the establishment of Vichy France by Nazi Germany in 1940. As a native speaker of French, he was transferred to the OSS intelligence services, helping the French Resistance and the British SOE during the Liberation of France. At the end of the war, he was sent to French Indochina to assist with Viet Minh guerrilla warfare against the Japanese, and he established a CIA base in Nuremberg in 1951. In 1954, he was sent back to Southeast Asia to spread anti-communist propaganda and to arm the Montagnards. During the 1963 South Vietnamese coup, he delivered $43,000 to the coup plotters and arrested Ngo Dinh Diem's brother Ngo Dinh Can, turning him over to the coup plotters for trial and execution. In 1968, Conein left the CIA and became a businessman in South Vietnam, but he became chief of the DEA's covert operations in 1972. He retired in 1984 and died in Bethesda, Maryland in 1998.